In which I go on at great length and there is much time in motor vehicles, a fair bit of rain, semi-ill-advised clambering on rocks, & a few dragons

So, when last I posted properly, I was unsure whether a)I would be able to see my blog and read comments while in mainland China, which, sadly, no and b)whether my cell phone would continue to work, which, miraculously, yes. So text me, my friends. Also miraculously, I can charge both phone and ipod in local outlets. Wheeee, technology!

We spent Sunday night at the Camellia Hotel in Kunming, a friendly tourist-focused place comprising a strange combination of hostel (very clean, nice dormitories) hotel (I stayed in one of the "old" rooms, which was exactly what I expected a room in a post-Communist country to look like, tatty beadspread, archaic electronics, creepy flourescent bathroom light and all- I suspect the "new" rooms may have more in common with the cheerful dorms), embassy (for Laos), travel agency (for.. everywhere, but particularly Tibet, Laos, and Vietnam), and spa. Yeah. One stop... everything. Considering that it was fairly low rent (my room was $15 US, I think), the hotel had an absolutely enormous staff, almost at a Four Seasons level. There were attendants on every floor, seemingly endless housekeeping staff, a guy whose only job was to bring the bottles of boiled water for tea to each room, and, apparently, a girl whose main function was to deal with the flower arrangement in the lobby. I watched her fiddling with masses of lysianthus, gladiolas, lillies, and, of all things, the flowers I know as "New Zealand calla lillies," the long-stemmed orange- and red- variegated type that rarely sell for less than $4US a stem. She was assisted by two other female members of the housekeeping staff, as well as a police officer acting as hotel guard and a couple of bus boys. Most of these seemed to be offering their advice, much to her chagrin.

We chartered a taxi to take us to the Xilin stone forest, a little over an hour outside of Kunming. The drive was my first ground-level experience with the Chinese countryside. Kunming, though apparently the flower capital of China, and blessed with clean, wide boulevards, is somewhat unlovely in many particulars. Like the hotel room, it feels the way you expect post-communist cities to feel... low, squat, square buildings without much character. On the other hand, the one genuine Communist building we saw, a more Mussolini-style hall with a graceful curve to its roof and a prominent red star in the center of same, was nearly completely obscured from view by billboards filled with ads, not propaganda. So perhaps rather more of the architectural deprivation is attributable to the free than to the fixed market.

Driving out of Kunming, I had the impression that a)China has never heard of zoning (apartments were stacked above garage front stores that sold every imaginable widget and component, from PVC tubes to sheet metal to old tires to spark plugs) and b) every rumor you've heard about its constantly eating its past to create its future is not only true, but the future in some ways occasionally resembles a midwestern suburb. Okay, that last isn't entirely fair, but there were an awful lot of buildings that seemed to resemble nothing so much as the Chinese version of McMansions. Many of the nicer buildings shared a style that was vaguely reminiscent of a Mediteranean or Persian vocabulary, with relatively elegant arched windows and balconies. On the other hand, there were many traditional low brick buildings that were either in the process of being knocked down or clearly marked for destruction that were obviously about to give way to yet another dismal concrete box.

Near the city, as I mentioned above, capitalism holds clear sway, as it would in any developing country, though with slightly more panache and less squalor... more a middle-class part of Harare or Capetown than the streets of Delhi or Ghana. Cars are plentiful (as are exhaust fumes), and so are motorbikes and bicycles. In many ways, China answers the question of what it might mean to be a second world nation, rather than a first or second.

In the countryside around Kunming, at least the parts of it that haven't yet been cleared for some kind of development, there are plenty the iconic green hills we all think of when we think of the Chinese countryside. Many people seem to live in the low brick houses, and the hills are marked by what seem to be individual farm plots. I assume that these plots are primarily for family use, as they don't seem quite big enough for commercial purposes.

As we approached the stone forest (one of several karst formations in the world- as I understand it, these are limestone deposits which emerged from the surrounding, softer rock and soil after centuries of erosion), we saw both beautiful scenery (there are plenty of stones outside the forest, and they create an effect vaguely reminsicent of the Scottish Highlands)and a fairly random accident: as we entered a tunnel, one of the lanes was closed off by a warning flag, and halfway through the tunnel, a small semi truck lay on its side, looking for all the world like a sleeping elephant. The driver was sitting calmly nearby, eating his lunch.

Driving in China is accompanied by a constant chorus of beeping. Cars honk to pass, they honk to approach, they honk to REproach, they seemingly honk just to say hello to one another. Although there were probably eight separate instances where I felt we were in danger of either being killed by another vehicle or killing someone ourselves (normally little old men on bikes on the side of the road), everything seemed to move smoothly around everything else, with near zen-like fluidity... not zen-like calm, of course, given the honking.

The stone forest itself seems to be a very popular Chinese tourist attraction, complete with gaudy signs, kitchsy souvenir stalls, hordes of umbrella-toting tourists (it was, as the brits say, pissing down rain), and hefty entrance fee ($10US). Lonely Planet is somewhat sniffy about the location, which I suspect is because it is about as authentic in its "ethnic minority" cultural shows as is Pipestone, MN, but that in no way detracted from the site's beauty and appeal. I was glad that we drifted quickly away from the main tourist path and spent most of our time wandering around by ourselves through deep green grasses marked with strange clusters of black monoliths. All the pathways are paved in stone, which we were grateful for in the rain, as we would otherwise have been slogging through lots of sticky orange mud- as it was, my black pants have quite a few orange dots on the back from the splashback. The drawback, of course, is that the stone is rather slippery when wet. There were quite a few staircases that, though they marked crevasses it would have been impossible to traverse in the rain without the paths, were slippery and steep enough to give us a moment's pause.

Kitsch aside, the rock formations were breathtaking, and frequently Stonehenge- and Tolkien- esque. It was not only easy to imagine the place inspiring all manner of fairy tales, it practically seemed PROOF of all the old myths about trolls turning to stone in the daylight... though these formations seemed more likely to unfurl themselves into dragons' wings than lumpen troll armies. Toward the end of the day, we happened to turn into one narrow path that, though it eventually led us into one of the main tourist plazas, initially seemed to take us straight into a greener, less evil Mordor. Huge craggy walls of stone surrounded us on all sides as we squeezed through narrow passageways too tight for one person to go through without turning sideways... and then descended hundreds of steep stairs to the bottom of the formation. We then faced hundreds more stairs to climb up and out through the other side. I damn near fully expected there to be at LEAST a huge castle at the other side, if not a giant dragon guarding its hoard. Instead, we found teeming masses of umbrella-wielding Chinese tourists having lunch. A tad anticlimactic, perhaps, but worth the journey.

We hurried back to Kunming to try to book "soft sleeper" train tickets to Dali, a town tucked high in the mountains, reknowned for its ethnic minority population and well-preserved arcitecture dating back to the Ming dynasty... the 16th and 17th centuries. The train was sold out, so we instead opted for tickets on an express bus, which would get us into Dali at midnight.

China has four types of train.. hard seat, hard sleeper, soft seat, and soft sleeper. The hard seat trains are (apparently) primarily non-tourist, with no assigned seats, and subject to overcrowding. The soft seats are comparatively rare, with assigned seating. Hard sleeper trains have three levels of bunks, and soft sleepers are private compartments for 2-4 people, and of the standard of luxury of any sleeper train in the world. I have yet to experience any of these, but hope to take a soft sleeper from Shanghai to Beijing later in my trip.

As for buses, there are locals, express, and sleeper, which can be either. Our express bus featured a beautiful hostess in colorful ethnic garb (Alan and Cristoph are in agreement that the ethnic minority women are far and away the most attractive, and thus far I'm inclined to agree) with a sassy attitude. She provided us all with bottles of water and a souvenir pocket mirror. The bus also showed one Hong Kong action movie starring Jet Li and a half-English language Chinese propaganda film about an American pilot helping the communists fight the Japanese in WWII.

On our way out of town, we encountered a traffic jam that appeared to be caused by a confluence of stalled vehicles. Our first clue something was amiss was the minibus that slammed on its brakes in front of us (us, in this case, being a bus only slightly smaller than a Greyhound) and drifted to the side of the road. Immediately thereafter, a car toward the back of what looked like three lanes of slow traffic ahead moved into reverse, then pulled a U-turn and started driving the wrong way down the side of the freeway. In China, it seems, traffic is governed more by what is theoretically physically possible than by any actual rules. I commented to Alan that, given the regular conditions of chaos and disorder and the rather irregular catastrophic occurences, Chinese drivers on the whole must actually be vastly better than US drivers. He said that it was pretty much true, and the problem was that when they arrived in the US, they just didn't know how to deal with the actual rules.

Up next: the town of Dali.